Bootcamp finish line
I'm at the end of my study week - only today and tomorrow left. I managed to get quite a lot accomplished but not everything completed as fast as I wanted.
The official study guide came. It arrived on Wed afternoon. It's different from the other study materials, so I'm glad I'm using multiple sources for my studies. There is some overlap, but with using multiple sources, you don't miss out on anything. It's about 300 pages and written fairly well. I started a second notebook to keep notes specifically from this book. My other notebook has multiple sources in it. I took some time to start into it (to get a feel for the book) and got to page 69 in one day.
The book comes with a download of links to certain sections of the documentation. As I go through the material in the book, I pause to go to the link and read the relevant documentation. It makes the completion of the book slower, but I feel it gives a more solid footing within the material. Once I got a good feel for the book, I went back to complete the Udemy course.
The Udemy course has its good and bad points. There are a lot of things they point out (in the 20+ hr course) that I can see as possible test items. One of the things Microsoft is known to test about are conflicting settings and the results of those settings. People actually _do_ this ... and I'm actually glad they want you to know it. When you have "x" set at a higher level and the opposite set at the local level - what result will you get? That is the plus of that course.
The downside of the course is that a lot of "workarounds" are used. The instructor goes into painstaking detail (step-by-step) about how to use Azure to simulate an on-prem environment in order to configure some things (like connecting to Azure). I guess this is good for those who want to set up a lab and play with configurations, but I can also see where that may confuse quite a few people. Not to mention, someone wanting to actually DO this in a real environment wouldn't have a clue where to start. No, you don't connect your on-prem environment to Azure by creating a VM in Azure. You have to talk to the network team and use a REAL ROUTER.
Which also leads me to the frustration with the certification itself. A LOT of it is more focused on the security part of engineering. It focuses more on how to configure this and that in the cloud. It does not cover which configurations are more secure than others (and why). It doesn't cover how misconfigurations can be exploited or services can be abused (and how to prevent that abuse). It's more focused on cloud personnel implementing security rather than security personnel performing cloud governance or securing the environment. But this is what exists at this moment, and it's more relevant than any of the other Azure certifications.
And now it's time to get back to the Udemy videos.....
